A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard



Poem fractal

Side by side

Random

0.078 apart. A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.

This number is read from the build of the lines. The bright edge is that number, carried outward until the pattern repeats.

Stature

by Helen Hoyt

0.7654 − 0.1682i

Drawing the boundary…

I Die Alive

by Robert Southwell

0.8393 − 0.1436i

Drawing the boundary…

The poems

Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.

Stature

by Helen Hoyt

I must stand on tiptoe to reach your lips,
I must stand on tiptoe in my soul to reach you,
To reach the height of my own love.
It is what I want—to have you tall.

I Die Alive

by Robert Southwell

O life what lets thee from a quicke decease?
O death what drawes thee from a present pray?
My feast is done, my soule would be at ease,
My grace is said, O death come take away.

I live, but such a life as ever dies,
I die but such a death, as never ends,
My death to end my dying life denies,
And life my living death no whit amends.

Thus still I die, yet still I do revive,
My living death by dying life is fedd:
Grace more then nature keepes my hart alive,
Whose Idle hopes and vaine desires are dead.

Not where I breath, but where I love I live,
Not where I love, but where I am I die:
The life I wish, must future glory give,
The deathes I feele, in present dangers lie.

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Track 1
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